DockStar woes
by Moogle on Sep.09, 2010, under Electronics
I got my seagate dockstar today and took it apart… and to my disapointment there was already a problem with it :(
Seagate made the boards as cheep as possible neglecting on the solder on the exposed sections of the ground plane that connects to the shielding.
The result? the shielding reacts with the copper and corrodes it away!!!
Left un fixed over a year or two the copper ground plane will most likely corrode away completely in some areas!
This is a really bad design mistake Seagate!!
The only true solution to this is to get a hot soldering iron and properly tin the pads with solder.
New DockStar section added to the forums
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Hackaday links: September 19, 2010 | Blackhat-forums
September 19th, 2010 on 4:01 pm[...] cracked open his DockStar to find corroded copper. It seems that Seagate left a portion of the ground plane unprotected and [...]
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Hackaday links: September 19, 2010 - Hack a Day
September 19th, 2010 on 4:03 pm[...] cracked open his DockStar to find corroded copper. It seems that Seagate left a portion of the ground plane unprotected and [...]
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hackaholicballa » Blog Archive » Hackaday links: September 19, 2010
September 20th, 2010 on 3:01 pm[...] cracked open his DockStar to find corroded copper. It seems that Seagate left a portion of the ground plane unprotected and [...]
September 20th, 2010 on 12:28 pm
It looks like they used an Organic Solderability Preservative (OSP) finish. (see: http://www.custompcb.com/red-soldermask-pcb-large.jpg) It is a thin, almost invisible layer over the copper that prevents it from oxidizing. It will protect the copper even if it hasn’t been soldered to. Chances are the flux in the solder paste dissolved the OSP on your board, which is now allowing it to corrode. This is likely a process control problem at some point in manufacturing.
September 23rd, 2010 on 11:05 am
A lot of the copper ground on my new Dockstar was also starting to corrode away. Thanks for this post! It is excellent information.
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